U.S. Pat. No. 4,823,265 disclosed a means for automated renewal of options until a designated event occurs. U.S. Pat. No. 4,334,270 disclosed a method for using a digital computer to update securities information of multiple accounts. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,674,044; 5,297,031; 5,347,452 deal with computer methods and visual displays for stock market brokers. From U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,209,845; 4,611,280; 5,218,700; 5,260,999 and 5,630,123 it was known to use software filtering and sorting to produce lists and locate specific data records. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,262,942 and 5,270,922 provide data processing systems to serve the special needs of major investment firms.
Yet in spite of the technological advances made to meet the needs of stock brokers and investment firms, the prior art contained no suggestion of how the individual investor's needs could be met with regard to processing financial data according to individualized criteria. For the individual investor the task of matching individual criteria, once the data was retrieved or accessed in the published media, could require many hours, where over 2,700 stocks and over 40,000 options were involved.